


morning and night

by cosmofluous



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, Greek Mythology - Freeform, M/M, Purple, as per usual, day and night au, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-09-16 14:20:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9275843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmofluous/pseuds/cosmofluous
Summary: Inspired by thisDay and Night AUby beanpots, but reversed.He really does hang the stars in the sky, and burn as bright as the sun.





	1. the sun loved the moon

**Author's Note:**

> this au is aesthetic af go check it out

The shadows of the grove cloaked him.

Silver-edged and soft as sleep, they draped the careless tangle of his long limbs in the lush meadow grass. His head was pillowed on his folded arms and crowned with fallen stars. He flicked his snow-laden gaze up with drowsy languor as Day stalked the edges of his shaded retreat.

‘Come in,’ he lilted, ‘I won’t run away.’

Pale golden light limned a tree with leaves like silver coins. Bronze fingers settled on the deep green ivy twining there, and doe eyes peeped out at him from the greenery. ‘What are you doing here?’ Day chimed softly. He trailed across the small grove, pulling sunbeams in behind him. Dust pixies danced in the light, delighting in the spectrum of colours that he revealed. The Night Ruler watched him calmly as he approached, dipping long, tapered fingers into cool well-water as he waited.

Day crouched beside his indolent form and canted his head to the side. ‘Aren’t you tired? Shouldn’t you be resting at home?’

Night hummed softly. ‘I stayed because I wanted to see you.’ Day reached out a hand and Night tilted his head, allowing himself to be petted. Day sifted his fingers through a stream of starlight, tugging gently. Night all but purred when Day brought his hand back up to his scalp, massaging.

‘You’re working too hard,’ Day admonished him. Night hummed again and chased his retreating touch. Day swept the silver back from the other’s forehead and lightly tapped the whorl in his hair. Night pouted.

‘You know I hate it when you do that.’ He sulked prettily.

Day only smiled back. Night paused, taken by the slow, seeping warmth in the expression. He gazed up at him helplessly, lips parted. Obligingly, Day leaned down and fitted their mouths together. Night reached up to cover the slope of his neck with his hand, fingers splayed possessively. Around them bloomed tiny white star jasmine, in a spill of warm, honey-coloured light. Dawn discarded her pink and grey veils to pull the sun into the sky with streamers of deep orange.

‘Good morning,’ said Night.

‘Good night,’ said Day. ‘Sweet dreams.’

And Night slipped from his embrace, to the place where the moon goes when it is no longer in our sky.


	2. so much that he died

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone steals the moon from the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didn't think i would add to this but this au is just that tempting

The night became a void.

It became dull and hollow and empty. The setting of the sun didn’t reveal the stars that had been strung there for so long. There was no lustre to the sky. No luxurious rumpling of pale blue-grey silk that fell to cobalt dye, that in turn surrendered to the gleaming black of deep space. Only a scraping of dimness from horizon to horizon, occasionally shredded by lost clouds. There was no moon.

Day despaired. He sent the sun chariot across the sky at odd hours. He wandered behind soft cloud banks, looking for the moon that always threw his light back. The mortal world did not suffer badly. Humans could not sense that the spirit of night, the fleet god that hunted by moonlight, was gone, nor that the spirit of day was distraught over his disappearance. They were uneasy that nothing lit their paths in the darkness anymore. But then it rained for seven days and seven nights, and so they did not keep it in their hearts.

The spirits of harvest and fertility lifted the rains at the end of seven days, scolding Day for moping about the sky realm. They sent him to the mortal realm to see how the unending sheets of rain had disturbed the mortals. So Day wandered again, in human guise, on the mortal plane.

He drifted over grasslands and meadows, through copses of trees and brimming waterfalls. He came upon a field of flowers on a cliffside. They were butter-yellow and snowy-white, and they followed the passage of the flaming chariot across the sky. The grass was long and lush, brushing Day’s ankles and calves underneath his sombre black cloak. The flora was vibrant and dewdrops still clung to petals and leaves. Day scoffed to think that the human realm had suffered from the rains. They had not even been that heavy. He saw no torn trees, no river that had broken its banks. Maybe overflowed a bit. It didn’t matter. None of them had suffered as Day had suffered without Night.

Night would have loved a clifftop such as this, simultaneously a portrait of poetic, stark beauty and a vista of abundance. He would have taken the simple hearty wildflowers and dipped them in silver paint and ebony lacquer, scattered starlight between the grasses like so many diamonds. The fireflies would come out to dance. Night himself would don trailing robes of pure silver and sit in the castle on the moon, and the moonbeams he sent to ground would keep weary travellers on their paths. Youths and maidens alike would watch him drift across the sky and sigh. He would pull the wind and waves across the ocean with lashings of white. The sailors would navigate by the constellations he hung in the sky, and he would guide them home, to heart and hearth.

Overcome with the dream he had woven for himself, Day fell to his knees in the flower meadow and wept. He wept great big tears, fat as pearls and as round. They splashed into the loamy earth, as if the ground hadn’t received enough rain the past week. At the thought that Night had been gone only so long, and that Day already hurt so much, he only wept the harder.

‘What’s wrong? Don’t cry.’

Startled, Day scrubbed the tears from his eyes and looked up. A youth had sat up in the flowers. Petals clung to his hair and clothes. He must have been concealed in the tall grasses. Day was embarrassed that he hadn’t sensed his form under the sun rays.

‘It’s nothing, I-’ Day stopped. The youth gazed at him in consternation, with eyes so blue they cut straight to the heart. His breath caught in his chest. In an instant, he had drowned in the sudden welling of hope and pain from the wound he carried there.

The youth tilted his head to the side in a gesture of endearing confusion. His bright hair spilled over his shoulder with the movement. He was lithe and lightly muscled, curved as the moon is curved, in variations, in phases. His eyes were deep-set and expressive, framed with feathery lashes. His nose was sharp and his mouth was made for smiling. His skin was luminous.

Day’s tears brimmed over again. ‘Night!’ he cried, equal parts pain and joy.

The youth grew even more flustered. ‘What?’ he said. He reached out as if he would take Day into his slender arms, then withdrew them and folded his hands in his lap. He wore a white chiton that was both innocent and alluring. ‘Please stop crying,’ he tried again. ‘You’re too beautiful to cry. My name is Viktor.’

Day felt his heart break again, but this time he held the pieces together grimly. The tears still cascaded down his cheeks, but he was able to even his breathing. ‘Hello,’ he said, in a brittle voice. A long pause. He patted the last of the tears off his cheeks and took a deeper breath. He tasted the simple fragrance of the wildflowers on the spring breeze. He sought for a name. He couldn’t very well give it as “Day” or “the Sun King.” Instead, ‘My name is Yuuri.’

Curious now, he calmed himself and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

For an answer, Viktor turned his face skywards, showing off the graceful line of his neck. He leaned back on his palms. ‘I come here to watch the sun with the flowers.’ He fidgeted a little, looked at Day as if he might judge him. He explained, ’You see, no one really watches the sun. He’s too bright to keep one’s eyes on. It’s such a shame too. I could watch the sun forever.’ And then he looked up again, jewel-like eyes lidded under the silvery haze of his lashes. He looked as if he would turn into a sunflower then and there.

‘What about the moon?’ Day asked. He heard his own voice come out small and sad.

Viktor reached out, and this time he did touch him. Day held his breath as Viktor pulled them both back down into the bed of flowers and waving grass. ‘The moon is beautiful too, Yuuri,’ Viktor said breathlessly, and Day wanted to steal that voice for his own. He wanted to bottle the sound and tip it about when he was lonely. He was sure that if any sound could move like liquid mercury, Viktor’s voice would. Viktor was still speaking, arms out-flung, his body lax. ‘But everyone loves the moon.  Everyone wants to steal the moon and keep her for themselves. They want to break off bits of her and carry them home.’ Day swallowed guiltily. ‘Everyone loves the sun too, but they don’t say so. It’s as if it’s too obvious. Besides, no one would dare to steal the sun. That wouldn’t be romantic. It would just be selfish.’

Day closed his eyes and reached for the sun chariot. He couldn’t help himself. He cradled Viktor’s form in sunbeams, and listened to him sigh in contentment. His heart recorded the sound well enough. For a wild moment of singular clarity, he wished he really was a mortal named Yuuri, and he and Viktor could build a home on a cliff by the sea, and lie in flower fields when there was nothing to do, and maybe even when there were things to be done. They wouldn’t have celestial palaces or heavenly raiments, or divine forces to command, but they would have each other. And maybe they wouldn’t destroy each other as other mortals did, but hold each other up and co-exist in perfect harmony.

After that, Yuuri visited Viktor every day. Night’s absence didn’t tear at him as it once did, although Viktor’s similarities to his other half sometimes wakened his lingering hurt. But even though the night sky was hollow and the daytime wavered in concurrence with it, all was peaceful for a time.


	3. every night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri is warm, searing, all-consuming. At least, he should be.

Loving Yuuri is just like being in love with the sun.

He wakes in the morning for Yuuri, and he goes to sleep at night because Yuuri is gone. One night, they camp together in a clearing by a waterfall, and he can’t sleep for joy. Yuuri is right beside him, cuddled into blanket and bedroll until the powerful (sensual) lines of his physique are hidden, and he’s just a soft-looking cocoon. Viktor wriggles in his own bedroll with barely contained excitement. Yuuri’s lashes are glistening dark fans against his smooth cheeks. The deep, calm rhythm of his breathing should be soothing to listen to, but it’s keeping Viktor awake with sheer adoration.

He’s sleeping so calmly, it’s hard to believe he was protesting. He had looked at the turning sky, worried at his sleeves. He had abandoned that musty black cloak, thank the gods. He still prefers darker, richer colours, but in sleeker lines now. Viktor loves the contrast—against them, Yuuri only burns the brighter.

‘I should go,’ Yuuri had said, regretfully.

‘Stay,’ Viktor had begged him, voice low and liquid, ‘Yuuri, stay with me.’

‘One night.’ A bitten-off smile.

And here they are. Their modest fire banked, steeping their pallets in a wavering amber-like glow. The occasional crackle of an ember as it splits, spitting sparks, white fissions living and dying in the flames. Familiar. Not so different from the trickle of the nearby waterfall, the quiet thunder of falling droplets. Lulled, Viktor snuggles back into warmth, reaching for sleep. Oops. He’s accidentally migrated to Yuuri’s pallet. Viktor shrugs to himself and pats Yuuri’s closest curve in a conciliatory gesture of appreciation. Yuuri murmurs something unintelligible, but Viktor thinks its approving.

‘Yuuri?’ Maybe Yuuri’s still awake. Maybe he’ll tell him a story. Viktor loves listening to Yuuri tell stories. He weaves him the most romantic tales, dramatic, outlandish, whimsical. Like a passionate game of love between a certain playboy and the most beautiful woman in town. More importantly, his eyes go wide with all the things he can’t convey in words, and a gleam goes around them. A meteorite, tracing a brilliant line of fire through deep space. 

Viktor wants the ebb and swell of his voice, tide-like, and the warm anchor of his hands as the wave of the story tugs them back and forth. He half-rises to shake Yuuri’s shoulder. ‘Yuuri…’

Yuuri makes a noise between a hum and a whimper. ‘Yuuri…?’ Viktor gets up proper, tucks the blankets back around Yuuri’s body. He lays the back of his hand on Yuuri’s cheek. Yuuri shifts and makes the sound again. His skin is cold. Clammy.

Trying not to panic, Viktor goes to build up the fire. He manoeuvres Yuuri’s pallet closer to it, and takes up position on his other side, hemming him in from the night. But he doesn’t feel like he can keep him warm. Putting his cold arms around Yuuri, Viktor closes his eyes and tries to remember from whence he comes.

He waits for morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *shows up 5 months late with chatime*


	4. to let him breathe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They meet in the middle.

The sun rose and fell and rose again.

'They love you, you know.'

Yuuri looked up at the sky canopy. He wished he was Yuuri. He was, but he wasn't. He couldn't be.

'I can't do that,' he said. 'I can't be that. I can't be that for them, that beloved one. Can't I go away from here? Can't I go away and just be Yuuri?'

Dawn and Dusk and all the spirits of the harvest ringed his sickbed. They looked at him, and then at one another. 'No,' they echoed.

Yuuri sank into his pillows and closed his eyes. He had been sick, they had said. He had wandered too far from home, and become wan and faded. So they said.

'Where's Viktor?' he asked plaintively. He didn't open his eyes.

The spirits shifted uneasily, their shining raiments brushing up against one another. They made a shushing sound, like an errant breeze through a sea of trees. A nothing sound. An empty sound.

'Who's Viktor?' they asked.

* * *

He slept, deeply, then poorly.

He woke to the curtains of his circular chamber billowing inwards, white waves. One side was burnished with a ruddy light, and spanned with gold tracery. The other side was a bolt of silk, dyed indigo. He thought he saw a flicker of silvery-white light, like a distant meteorite falling to the mortal realm. But he fooled himself.

'Someone stole my love from me,' he confided to the shadowy figure at the foot of his bed. They wore the shadows like a soft cape. Not like the black cloak he had hunkered inside of to hide his luminescence. The shadows embraced them, as ivy hugs a friendly oak, easy as long-time lovers. They were natural, accentuating an almost indiscernible glow.

He thought to reach out to them, but his cold fingers only twitched. He was still a bit feverish. Frowning, his intention slipped his mind.

The figure watched him with a sad cant to their head. He felt as though someone had their fingers on his eyelids, trying to close them; he let them. He needed sleep. It was the great healer, for humans and gods all. He knew that, instinctively, if he returned to his daily schedule of tending the sun chariot, and, well, not being stifled in black fabric and denying his true nature, he would be fine. But part of him also knew he would never be in balance unless what was most important to him returned.

A faint impression of a cool hand against his cheek, palm against his jaw, fingers sliding into his sweat-damp hair. He relaxed into it, warming.

'No one stole the moon from you, Yuuri,' said a voice, a voice like a drink of cool well-water. Yuuri- Day- He thought this last thought, a thought like a line of ink on a watery page, blurring beyond comprehension. He wanted to tuck that voice in his cheek, under his tongue, it was such a sweet swelling of sound.

'You stole me from yourself,' said Viktor, with chagrin.

* * *

They sat on the marble steps descending from Day's white pavilion, on the twilit shore of the Sea of Dreams. The water lapped up against their sandalled feet, clouds of ink in the vermillion and charcoal of Dusk and Dawn. Viktor, his Night, remained on the side that tapered away into velvet darkness. For an unbearably long moment, it seemed that they were years and worlds away. Day studied the glimmer of stars beneath the waves.

'I'm-'

'-sorry.'

They made blistering eye contact. Day felt a flush of heat all the way to the tips of his ears. He dropped his gaze.

'I want to be with you all the time,' Day heard himself say. It came out in a graceless jumble of syllables. Consonants bumping up against one another, his tongue fumbling against his teeth. How could language be this thing, this lumpy, oafish, oatmeal mix of glottal stops and squawks and shifting vowels? How he could ever tell Viktor how he felt? Emotion wasn't language. How could he ever hope to express something that was true? In Viktor's mouth, language was a hush, was both gentle implication and a loud declaration. Tenacious in its assumption of power. He staked his ground, claimed it, sent flowering vines spidering across a barren wasteland. What he says is true because he makes it so.

But he digressed.

Day swallowed, heard the dry click of his throat in the thickening silence. There was a rustling, overlapping with the eddying of tides and time around them. There was a sudden flurry, and Day thought, _this is what it's like to die inside of a meteor shower._ And then Night was there, and everywhere. And he was Night then, not Viktor, not a discrete, singular entity, a tiny strand of life that would twist in, then out of sight again too quickly. A sliver of silver lost in the vast tapestry of space-time. He was Night, as he had been and as he had always been: as he always would be.

Night kissed Day. Night was supposed to be silent, the time for sleeping, but in him Day heard the thousand thousand songs of a multitude of burning lives, breathing and eating and hunting and living and loving. Night pulled himself closer, across the divide. He sank his fingers into the pillow-crushed strands of Day's soft, dark hair, the tiny lights dancing on his crown weak and faint still. And Night's fingers were moonbeams mingling with solar flares, and between them there were stars.

Between Viktor and Yuuri, there were lips, tongue and teeth, and lips, and lips again, impossibly sweet. 'Silly Yuuri,' Viktor said against his mouth, as if he couldn't bear to pull away. 'You are with me all the time.' He smiled, gleam of silver off the leaping surf, and captured Day's hand to press it to his heart. 'And I'm with you.'

Day understood. They were two sides of the same force, inexorably woven into one another. They were the currents and the white-tipped waves. No one could pull them apart, not really. Where one went, the other followed. Day pulled back, bit his lip and saw Viktor's eyes drawn to the motion. 'Not like that,' he said, desperate to reach the other. 'Not like kings and rulers. Not like the sun and the moon. Just Viktor and Yuuri.' He felt himself flush again.

'We can have holidays,' Viktor said brightly, and the mischievous gleam in his eyes was the flicker of a koi fish, evading searching hands in the shallows. Scales caught in the sunlight. 'We can have days off. We can have  _honeymoons.'_

Night wrapped Day back up in his arms. Oddly enough, he had assumed an older guise now. He was taller than Day again, and they fit as cleanly together as if someone had sanded their edges with the other in mind. 'But even when we're not on holiday, we're still Yuuri and Viktor. You don't think we become different beings if we're called different things, do you?' He pulled back to look at Yuuri, and for a moment, seemed genuinely concerned.

Day protested, 'Names are important.'

'You are important.'

Yuuri heated again, and wondered if he was scorching the marble. Viktor said, 'Yuuri, you're the Sun King. You  _are_ important, and not just to me.' Viktor looked up, thinking, and the sky was a reflection of his eyes. 'Most of all to me,' he amended.

Yuuri swallowed. He'd need time to think it over. For now, though, there was healing to be had, and a long overdue honeymoon to plan. He leaned into Viktor's- Night's chest (and of course Viktor was in Night, how had he not seen that? And Night had been in Viktor). Tangled in starlight, he murmured, 'Good night.'

Viktor rested his head on Yuuri's. His voice was molten, pre-dawn light surrendering to the new day.

'Good morning.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's all folks


End file.
